From the Video – Differentiation using cut out strips with words, meets standard: can cut out a strip of paper and identify beginning sounds of words on strip. Above: identify ending/middle sounds or write out words. Below: give a cut out of letters and let students match letters to the beginning sounds. The goal is to make an activity easier and more challenging for others. It’s NOT about giving out more work. Otherwise students will think that being smart is bad and vice versus.
Differentiated Instructions: means shaking up what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn. Thinking ahead and adding in aspects to challenge students who work above grade level, and to assist learners who may be below grade.
Characteristics of Differentiated Instruction:
- Rigorous means that teachers provide challenging instruction that encourages students’ active engagement in learning
- Relevant means that teachers address literacy standards to assure that students learn essential knowledge, strategies, and skills
- Flexible means that teachers use a variety of instructional procedures and grouping techniques to support students
- Complex means that teachers engage students in thinking deeply about books they’re reading, compositions they’re writing, and concepts they’re learning
Differentiating the Content: The content is the “what” of teaching, the literacy of knowledge, strategies, and skills that students are expected to learn at each grade level. Teachers decide how they’ll differentiate the content by assessing students’ knowledge before they begin teaching, and then they match students with the appropriate activities.
Differentiating the Process: The process is the “how” of teaching, the instruction that teachers provide, the materials they use, and the activities students are involved in to ensure that they’re successful. Teachers group students based on abilities and find materials at the appropriate level of difficulty. They make decisions about how to involve them in activities that can showcase their learning orally, written, or visual means.
Differentiating the Product: The product is the result of learning; it demonstrates what students understand and how well they can apply what they’ve learned. They can create projects such as posters, multimodal reports, board games, puppet shows, and new versions of stories.
Grouping for Instruction: Teachers use three grouping patterns: sometimes students work together as a whole class, and at other time work in small groups or individually. Small groups are used flexibly to provide a better instructional match between students and their needs. Students are generally grouped and re-grouped often according to their achievement levels. Grouping patterns: see pg. 373, figure 11-1. (Basal Readers, Literature Focus Units, Literature Circles, Reading Workshop, and Writing Workshop)
Guided Reading: Developed to use with beginning readers, but is also used with older readers, such as ELL’s and those struggling readers who need more teacher support to decode and comprehend books they’re reading, learning reading strategies, and become independent readers.
Tiered Activities: To match students’ needs, teachers create several tiered or related activities that focus on the same essential knowledge but vary in complexity. These activities are alternate ways of reaching the same goal because “one-size-fits-all” activities can’t benefit on-grade-level students, support struggling readers, and challenge advanced students. Teachers vary activities in different ways:
- they vary them by complexity of thinking. In recall-level activities, students identify, retell, or summarize; in analysis level activities, they compare and categorize; in synthesis-level activities, students evaluate, draw conclusions, or invent.
- they vary activities according to the level of reading materials. They use books and other print and online materials written at students’ reading level, or vary the way they share the materials with students.
- vary through activities by the form of expression. Students are involved in visual, oral, and written expression as they complete and activity.
- teachers decide which students will do each version of the activity.
Literacy Centers: Literacy centers contain meaningful, purposeful activities that students can work at in small groups. Students practice phonics skills at the phonics center, sort word cards at the vocabulary center, or listen to books related to a book they’re reading at the listening center. Description of centers on p. 377.
Struggling Readers: It’s crucial to identify students at risk for reading problems early so these problems can be addressed quickly, before they’re compounded.
- Difficulty developing concepts about written language, phonemic awareness, letter names, and phoneme-grapheme correspondences
- Slower to respond than classmates when asked to identify words
- Behavior that deviates from school norms
Struggling Writers: Some students have difficulty developing and organizing ideas, some struggle with word choice and writing complex sentences and effective transitions and others have problems with spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar skills.
High Quality Classroom Instruction: teachers use a balanced approach that combines explicit instruction in decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing along with daily opportunities for students to apply what they’re learning in authentic literacy activities. They also use:
- Personalizing Instruction: teachers adjust their instructional programs to match students’ needs using flexible grouping, tiered activities, and respectful tasks.
- Using appropriate instructional materials: most teachers have plenty of books available for on-grade-readers, but sometimes finding books for struggling students is a bit more difficult. Recommendation is to use a whole class book only 25% of the time, the rest choose books that fit students reading levels.
- Expanding Teachers’ Expertise: Teachers continue to grow professionally during their careers through organizations, book clubs, workshops and conferences, and teacher-inquiry projects.
- Collaborating with Literacy Coaches: Literacy Coaches are experience teacher with special expertise in working with struggling readers and writers.
How to Address Struggling Readers problems: p. 386-387 Solutions. Some problems are: Student doesn’t understand print concepts, student cant name letters or match upper and lower case letters, Student cant manipulate speech sounds…. Plus many more. See book. too many to list.
How to Address Struggling Writers Problems: p.388-389 (solutions). Lack of ideas, organization, motivation, issues with the writing process or the composition itself. Many more, see book.
Interventions: programs to address low-achieving students’ reading and writing difficulties and accelerate their literacy learning.
Early Interventions: focus for intervention has changed to early intervention for at-risk children to eliminate the pattern of school failure that begins early and persists throughout some students’ lives.
Reading Recovery: it involves 30 minute daily one-on-one tutoring by specifically trained and supervised teachers for 12-30 weeks. it involves
- rereading familiar books
- independently reading the book introduced in the previous lesson
- learning decoding and comprehension strategies
- writing sentences
- reading a new book with teacher support
Response to Intervention: a schoolwide initiative to identify struggling students quickly, promote high-quality classroom instruction, provide effective interventions, and increase the likelihood that students will be successful. it involves 3 tiers
- Screening and Prevention
- Early Intervention
- Intensive Intervention
Interventions for older students: approximately 25% of students in the upper grades are struggling readers, and they need effective classroom interventions in addition to high-quality reading instruction.
- High-Quality Instruction – teachers provide high-quality, appropriate literacy that’s tailored to students’ needs.
- Instructional-Level Reading Materials: teachers teach reading using books at students’ instructional level that are also appropriate for their age.
- More time for Reading: teachers increase the amount of time students spend reading independent level books each day, and they ensure that students choose interesting books to read.
Classroom Application:
There are so many different ways that this chapter could be used in a classroom. Differentiation is so important, and I wish I had read this chapter like a month ago! Each and every lesson plan needs to be tailored to your students abilities whether high or low or meeting requirements. So finding ways to change up a plan without adding in extra work for students is key. Also, being able to assess and see if any of your students are falling behind in reading or writing skills is equally important. That is why we can and should have different levels of learning for each lesson. I really loved reading about literacy centers. I think they are just so neat, and so fun for students to be able to pick what center they want to go work in for the day. Also, it opens it up for the teacher to work individually with students or a small group of students on skills they may need to fine tune. Great chapter!! I can’t wait to use this book to set up my classroom. (I bought it because it has so much great information)
virginiawilson 